A common belief among teachers, for example, is that bilingual students have a harder time learning to read than students who only know one language. Yet all research points to the exact opposite–not only that, but bilingual students pick up certain pre-reading skills faster than their monolingual classmates.
Summary: Researchers set out to examine what benefits bilingualism might have in the process of learning a third language. They found that students who know two languages have an easier time gaining command of a third language than students who are fluent in only one language.
Bilingualism strengthens cognitive abilities - bilingual people tend to be more creative and flexible. They can be more open-minded, and they also find it easier to focus on a variety of tasks simultaneously. And being able to speak two languages helps in other ways too...
The most commonly recorded cognitive benefits of bilingualism are improved attention span and focus, better problem-solving skills, and better organization and planning skills.
One of the things that makes learning a third language so much easier is that you have the experience of having learned a second. This means you can avoid a lot of pitfalls and focus on strengthening specific areas from day one. Think back to your first foreign language.
Being trilingual means that you speak three languages with general fluency. Some estimates put the total of the world's trilingual speakers at just over 1 billion people. That's 13% of everyone on Earth!
Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
Summary: Bilingual children develop a better working memory –- which holds, processes and updates information over short periods of time -– than monolingual children, according to new research.
Yet all research points to the exact opposite–not only that, but bilingual students pick up certain pre-reading skills faster than their monolingual classmates. In fact, bilingualism is associated with many other cognitive benefits like stronger multitasking skills, creativity, and working memory.
Some of these challenges are language fluency delay, mixing languages, dominance of one another over the other, reading and writing, being passively bilingual, prejudice, cultural and religious biases amongst others.
Does bilingualism make you smarter? In one sense, of course it does. You know two languages instead of one, already an advantage. Studies also show that bilingualism makes you better at learning additional languages and detecting language sounds, even when you're very young.
Knowing how to speak a second language has many advantages, and many studies suggests that bilingual kids are smarter than others. In fact, there are some which even note the differences in how the brain develops with bilingual and monolingual kids.
For example, relative to a bilingual, a trilingual has to remember even more words and has to inhibit even more languages. To adapt to this increase in cognitive demands, trilinguals may develop a larger cognitive supply (i.e., greater advantages) than bilinguals.
But it turns out that bilingual children and adults perform better when it comes to multitasking and focusing on important information. That's because the other languages are always present in the background.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Early research on bilingualism, conducted before the 1960s, however, linked bilingualism with lower IQ scores, cognitive deficiencies and even mental retardation. These studies reported that monolingual children were up to three years ahead of bilingual children in both verbal and non-verbal intelligence.
Academic Advantage
Bilingual children may also have an advantage in school, including with literacy. "Studies have shown that when a child learns a second language," says Denzer, "they show accelerated progress when learning to read compared with monolingual peers."
What we know is that children can learn multiple languages at once, and the benefits of being bilingual are endless. Learning multiple languages from birth is not a new phenomenon either. In fact, raising multilingual children is more common than most people think.
“When your brain processes language, it's not one place in the brain that processes language,” Marian says. “It's a network that's spread across all areas of the brain.” Because of that, bilingual brains have more pathways connecting different words, concepts and memories across different languages.
According to the study, when bilinguals speak in their second language, their brain inhibits their emotions and intuitions, prompting them to make more rational decisions in their second language.
Being bilingual helps maintain brain structure, prevents cognitive decline. Studies have shown that speaking more than one language may actually slow cognitive decline as bilingual and multilingual people grow older. As people age, the amount of white matter in the brain naturally begins to decline.